Tech Giants Face a Familiar Uncertainty With Trump

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Tech Giants Face a Familiar Uncertainty With Trump

Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and others learned during the last Trump administration to expect the unexpected when it came to Washington scrutiny and support.

While president-elect in 2016, Donald J. Trump met with leading tech executives and entrepreneurs at his office in Manhattan.Credit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times

By Cecilia Kang and David McCabe

Cecilia Kang and David McCabe reported on tech policy from Washington during the first Trump administration.

Nov. 7, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

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At a meeting with Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook and other tech leaders in 2016, President-elect Donald J. Trump told the gathering, “I’m here to help you folks do well.”

Instead, Mr. Trump’s treatment of the tech industry during his first term was unpredictable and at times lashing.

His regulators filed antitrust charges against Meta and Google and launched investigations into Apple and Amazon. He accused Meta and Twitter of censorship, resulting in Republican-led congressional hearings grilling tech executives. He moved to ban TikTok and blasted Amazon for shirking its tax obligations.

Now with Mr. Trump’s election victory on Tuesday, tech executives face the prospect of another four years of similar uncertainty. The president-elect has promised to put the tech billionaire Elon Musk in a newly created position to bring efficiencies to the government and vowed to deregulate industry. He has indicated that the government’s efforts to break up Google for a monopoly in search may go too far, even though the investigation into the company started in his term. He has flip-flopped on the fate of TikTok, which again faces a U.S. ban. And he has promised more tariffs, which could affect chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers.

The stakes are high. American tech companies — some of the most valuable in the world — are central to how people shop, communicate and consume information online. The industry pours billions of dollars into new and existing technologies, including most recently artificial intelligence. The industry is also in the middle of a geopolitical battle with China and other nations over technological supremacy.

“He’s been incredibly unpredictable on tech and seems prone to changing positions on any topic,” said Scott Babwah Brennen, director of the Center on Technology Policy at New York University.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, Brian Hughes, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had the support of “some of the nation’s most respected tech innovators and Silicon Valley leaders.”

“These people understand that President Trump’s agenda includes economic, tax and regulatory policies that will bolster American innovation and restore us to a position of global dominance in the technology sector,” Mr. Hughes said.

To potentially get ahead of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable streak, tech chiefs began making overtures to him weeks ago, with private calls after a July assassination attempt. On Wednesday morning, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the rocket company Blue Origin; Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta; and Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon, all congratulated Mr. Trump.

“Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love,” Mr. Bezos wrote on X.

Nu Wexler, a former policy official at Twitter, Meta and Google, said, “The tech companies are wiser and more pragmatic.” While tech executives felt pressure from employees to stand up to Mr. Trump in his first term because of his language and policies against Muslims and immigration, “employee voices don’t matter as much anymore,” added Mr. Wexler, founder of Four Corners Public Affairs in Washington.

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Mr. Trump at an October rally with Elon Musk, who played a prominent role in the Trump campaign. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

After the 2016 election, Mr. Trump’s early tech policy decisions were largely in line with the Republican establishment. In 2017, his Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules, which barred internet providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking certain content online.

Mr. Trump’s agenda also reflected a hawkish approach to geopolitical competition with China. In May 2019, he moved to prohibit American telecommunications companies from using foreign equipment as part of a crackdown on Chinese manufacturers like Huawei.

That same year, Mr. Trump’s appointees to the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission opened antitrust investigations into Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon. Before he left office, the Justice Department sued Google, accusing it of abusing a monopoly over online search. In August, a judge ruled against Google, and the government has signaled that it may ask for the company to be broken up.

Mr. Trump said in 2020 that he would ban TikTok unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sold the app to an American company. ByteDance’s ownership was a national security problem, he said. It ultimately appeared that the app might be sold to investors including Oracle, the cloud computing firm, and Walmart. Oracle’s chief executive, Safra Catz, and one of its founders, Larry Ellison, have been longtime supporters of Mr. Trump. The deal fizzled, and Mr. Trump left office.

This year, President Biden signed a bill into law that would again force ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban. But — in one of many reversals — Mr. Trump joined the app in June and has since suggested that he would rescue TikTok from a U.S. ban. He has not been clear about how he would do that.

“For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump,” he said in a September video posted to Truth Social, the online platform he owns.

Mr. Trump made another reversal after the F.T.C. sued Amazon in September last year, accusing it of antitrust violations. Mr. Trump criticized the suit, which had originated from an investigation that began during his tenure.

“Whether you like Amazon or not, how can the Federal Trade Commission sue to break it up?” he wrote on Truth Social.

Mr. Trump has found fans in Silicon Valley, which has typically leaned liberal. His relationship with Mr. Musk, who is chief executive of Tesla and owns X and the rocket company SpaceX, was front and center in the final weeks of the campaign. In his victory speech on Wednesday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Musk a “supergenius.”

Truth Social, in which Mr. Trump owns a 57 percent stake, also introduces a wrinkle to social media regulation.

But some of Mr. Trump’s grievances against the industry have deepened since he left office, former advisers said.

He still has many complaints about censorship and believes that the tech companies’ leaders favor Democrats, said Barry Bennett, a Republican strategist and former Trump adviser. While Mr. Trump has become increasingly fascinated by tech — in part because of Mr. Musk — the president-elect still thinks the platforms were biased against him and “won’t forget,” Mr. Bennett said.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for tech because they’ve learned lessons from his first four years,” he said. “That is, if they learned.”

Danielle Kaye contributed reporting from New York.